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Do Game Development Degree Programs Give As Good As They Get? - Part 2
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May 6, 2010
By Eric M. Scharf

While Epic's Unreal Engine 3 (UE3), Id's idTech 5, and Crytek's Cryengine continue to be the cream of the crop among modern day commercial game engines, Unity and HeroEngine have quickly staked claims to some substantial game development real estate - generating a solid following with their collective ease of use, depth of tools, and reasonable pricing models.
 
UE3 has maintained the greatest saturation level among AAA development houses and game development degree programs. Saturation, however, should not be misinterpreted as the best or only choice among school curriculums that actually utilize several of these competing technologies within their projects.
 
All but two of these popular game engine technologies come with a powerful suite of sub-tools - specialized for artists, designers, programmers, audio technicians, and even QA personnel.
 
While it is becoming less and less common these days, if you are developing your own proprietary game engine and tools suite, then, these commercial offerings will have no bearing on your game development approach - other than to provide a basis for comparison.

Emergent's Gamebryo is unique among this group in that it is an enhanced middleware that can behave like a game engine . . . as long as a game developer is willing to fill in a "few" blanks.
 
Gamebryo is a collection of powerful code components and tools that - when meshed together within your own established code base - are capable of becoming every bit as robust as what you would receive from the other complete game engines. Other than a noticeable cost difference, your lead programmer really has to be confident that creating your own custom code base is absolutely necessary before you pursue Gamebryo for developing your games. Otherwise, time is money, and a complete game engine will pay for itself if used wisely.
 
Criterion Software's Render Ware helped establish the enhanced middleware market for products like Gamebryo and Garage Games' Torque, but upon being absorbed by Electronic Arts, so many loyal users backed away from licensing the technology. EA took Render Ware "underground," but it is still utilized within a number of its own studios.
 
While Gamebryo, Render Ware, and other enhanced middlewares help build your games up, Havok is a robust physics-based middleware designed to help tear your games down - encouraging impressive destructibility in a variety of high and low detail 3D environments.

Second Life and Multiverse are generally exclusive to the development and operation of online virtual worlds - typically used by any number of small businesses and large corporations to sell or attract attention to their virtual wares.

 

Blender deserves a special mention as a very robust all-in-one, open-source game development solution (3D animation, modeling, rendering, rigging, and game engine) - that like almost any other robust software application has a learning curve due to its unique user interface. Tutorials and support for Blender - outside of trolling associated forums - have been below average at best - but, then, not all open source applications - to be fair - are destined to receive the organizational care and attention of a Firefox.

 

"Game Maker" - by YoYo Games - also deserves a special mention as the most user friendly - yet multifaceted - game engine ever offered free to the public. It has the simplicity of some popular web site design applications. It offers a flexible and robust feature set that liberates "the common user" and encourages early teen game enthusiasts to engage their creative technological curiosities.

Just when would-be game developers thought they could come up with a robust concept and hit the "make game" button, they learn of the additional tools - for middleware, source control, and bug tracking - necessary to help establish and maintain the infrastructure of their creations.

 

I can still recall some of the earliest days of old school batch files being strung together to generate an automated build process for a game project. Each batch file contained a list of targeted assets to be virtually grabbed from various directories on various computer systems. If one syllable or number was misspelled or out of position, the entire build process would come crashing down - followed by a very public witch hunt for the lazy (or overworked) culprit.

 

The robust automated build processes of today offer the ability to make playable builds for entire projects, specific components, individual development disciplines, and even function successfully while isolating dreaded "broken" assets.

 

It takes only a few weeks in a game development environment to realize exactly how deep interdisciplinary dependencies run on a project. Every asset has a matching asset somewhere else along the chain of immense teamwork involved in game development. While there is always a danger in relying too heavily on automated tools, some are absolutely necessary toward maintaining your sanity in the face of assigning, tracking, updating, and completing hundreds, thousands, and millions of unique assets.

 

Confluence's JIRA and WIKI products have been well-received in the games industry as reasonably-priced and capable bug / task tracking and information sharing solutions. While Bugzilla certainly has its following, Subversion has also been a big hit as a free and relatively feature-filled source control among game developers.

 

Alienbrain has always been the premiere art-centric source control but a costly one - boasting great flexibility through a relatively friendly user interface. Perforce - alternatively - is a popular code-centric source control with its own premium cost, though more and more studios are utilizing it across the board for all disciplines. Perforce does offer a no-cost license for open source developers, but therein lies the rub:  game developers want to keep their often-times proprietary source code to themselves.

 

Mogware is best described as an equally robust, simpler to use, and cheaper to purchase Alienbrain. Mogware has even lower cost pricing models on the horizon.

 

Scaleform has quickly caught on in the past six months as one of the best, most feature complete, and easy to manipulate user interface design applications on the market.  It is relatively simple to integrate into a custom code base, allowing crack teams of UI artists, designers, and programmers to quickly generate quality proofs of concept and functional results.

 

Speedtree seems like it has "been around forever," assisting artists and designers alike with the rapid population of 3D environments with lush vegetation. Cost is far less of an issue than what level of visual quality you are willing to accept from an automated process. Forests of original, exhaustively hand-built 3D trees would be wonderful but only on that rare project with boundless resources . . . and time still counts as a resource.

 

Bink Video has been around forever, and it continues to be the default, fire-and-forget choice for video compression among most game developers.

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